Picador

In this hilarious romp through England, one of America's pre-eminent humourists seeks the answer to an eternal question: what makes the Brits tick? One semi-tropical Fourth of July, Joe Queenan’s English wife suggested that the family might like a chicken tikka masala in lieu of the customary barbecue. It was this pitiless act of gastronomic cultural oppression, coupled with the dread of the fearsome Christmas pudding that awaited him for dessert, that inspired the author to make a solitary pilgrimage to Great Britain. Freed from the obligation to visit an unending procession of Auntie Margarets and Cousin Robins, as he had done for the first twenty-five years of his marriage, Queenan decided that he would not come back from Albion until he had finally penetrated the Limey heart of darkness. His trip was not in vain. Crisscrossing Old Blighty like Cromwell hunting Papists, Queenan finally came to terms with the choochiness, squiffiness, ponciness and sticky-wicketness that lie at the heart of the British character. Here he is trying to find out whose idea it was to impale King Edward II on a red-hot poker – and what this says about English sexual politics. Here he is enjoying a tour of Liverpool given by Big Jim, a cab driver whose best man was John Lennon. And here he is in Stroud, impressed by Talon, an all-Brit Eagles tribute band fresh from the Cheese and Grain in Frome. At the end of his epic adventure, the author returns chastened, none the wiser, but encouraged that his wife is actually as sane as she is, in light of her fellow countrymen.

In The Rules of Attraction Bret Easton Ellis trains his incisive gaze on the kids at self-consciously bohemian Camden College, a small, affluent liberal-arts college in New England at the height of the Reagan 80s. He treats their sexual posturings and agonies with a mixture of acrid hilarity and compassion while exposing the moral vacuum at the centre of their lives. Racing from Thirsty Thursday Happy Hours to Dressed To Get Screwed parties to drinks at The Edge of the World, this is a poignant take on the death of romance.

Katherine Millar is eighteen and desperate to be less fat, less swotty and to have cooler friends. But most of all she wishes she had two parents, instead of one grandma, Poll. Poll is pushing seventy, half blind and utterly poisonous. She has looked after Katherine since she was a baby, when her father was killed in a car crash and her mother vanished. Poll's ambition is for things to stay exactly the same for ever, and for Katherine never to leave their pit village of Bank Top. Katherine has other ideas, and she can feel change is coming; the omens are all around her. In the meantime, she cleans up after Poll, revises for her exams, watches daytime television and surfs the net at the library trying to find out how to be bulimic. What she doesn't quite realize yet is that life won't always wait for you to catch up with it. «Swallowing Grandma» is a perceptive, vivid and painfully funny novel about the ties of love and loathing, and the ways in which our versions of the past can thwart our visions for the future. In «Katherine and Poll», Kate Long has created two unforgettable characters locked in an epic battle over whose side of the story will prevail.

This title is the winner of the 2005 Man Booker Prize. When art historian Max Morden returns to the seaside village where he once spent a childhood holiday, he is both escaping from a recent loss and confronting a distant trauma. The Grace family had appeared there, in that long-ago summer, as if from another world. Mr. and Mrs. Grace, with their worldly ease and candour, were unlike any adults he had met before. But it was his contemporaries, the Grace twins, Myles and Chloe, who most fascinated Max. He grew to know them intricately, even intimately, and what ensued would haunt him for the rest of his years and shape everything that was to follow. Praise for The Sea: 'With his fastidious wit and exquisite style, John Banville is the heir to Nabokov. The Sea [is] his best novel so fa... Banville's prose is sublime' — Daily Telegraph. 'This is a novel in which all Banville's remarkable gifts come together to produce a real work of art, disquieting, disturbing, beautiful, intelligent, and in the end, surprisingly, offering consolation' — Allan Massie, Scotsman. ' The Sea is a beautiful novel, challenging and richly rewarding... It is a comfort to know that we have a lord of language among us' — Gerry Dukes, Irish Independent.

Dissects what Proust had to say about friendship. This title looks at paying attention, taking your time, being alive and includes the author's commentary.

Taking in Aristotle, Wittgenstein, history, religion, and Groucho Marx, the author charts the progress of a love affair from the first kiss to argument and reconciliation, from intimacy and tenderness to the onset of anxiety and heartbreak. He attempts to define the age-old dilemmas of the heart.

Patrick Bateman is twenty-six and works on Wall Street; he is handsome, sophisticated, charming and intelligent. He is also a psychopath. Taking us to a head-on collision with America's greatest dream — and its worst nightmare — American Psycho is a bleak, bitter, black comedy about a world we all recognize but do not wish to confront. Serious, clever and shatteringly effective. — Sunday Times. American Psycho is a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel... The novelist's function is to keep a running tag on the progress of the culture; and he's done it brilliantly... A seminal book. — Fay Weldon, Washington Post. For its savagely coherent picture of a society lethally addicted to blandness, it should be judged by the highest standards. — John Walsh, Sunday Times. That the book's contents are shocking is downright undeniable, but just as Bonfire of the Vanities exposed the corruption and greed engendered in eighties politics and high living, American Psycho examines the mindless preoccupations of the nineties preppy generation. — Time Out.

Imagine becoming a bestselling novelist while still in college, and almost immediately famous and wealthy, then seeing your insufferable father reduced to a bag of ashes in a safety-deposit box, even as your celebrity drowns in a sea of vilification, booze and drugs.

This is Alan Hollinghurst's first novel since «The Line of Beauty», winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize. In the late summer of 1913 the aristocratic young poet Cecil Valance comes to stay at 'Two Acres', the home of his close Cambridge friend George Sawle. The weekend will be one of excitements and confusions for all the Sawles, but it is on George's sixteen-year-old sister Daphne that it will have the most lasting impact, when Cecil writes her a poem which will become a touchstone for a generation, an evocation of an England about to change for ever. Linking the Sawle and Valance families irrevocably, the shared intimacies of this weekend become legendary events in a larger story, told and interpreted in different ways over the coming century, and subjected to the scrutiny of critics and biographers with their own agendas and anxieties. In a sequence of widely separated episodes we follow the two families through startling changes in fortune and circumstance. At the centre of this often richly comic history of sexual mores and literary reputation runs the story of Daphne, from innocent girlhood to wary old age. Around her Hollinghurst draws an absorbing picture of an England constantly in flux. As in «The Line of Beauty», his impeccably nuanced exploration of changing taste, class and social etiquette is conveyed in deliciously witty and observant prose. Exposing our secret longings to the shocks and surprises of time, «The Stranger's Child» is an enthralling novel from one of the finest writers in the English language.

Eric Packer is a twenty-eight-year-old multi-billionaire asset manager. He lives in Manhattan. We join him on what will become a particularly eventful day in his life. When he woke up, he didn't know what he wanted. Then he knew. He wanted to get a haircut. As his stretch limousine moves across town, his world begins to fall apart. But more worrying than the loss of his fortune is the realization that his life may be under threat.

These stories are clever, wise, reflective and permeated with understanding of what it has meant for generations from the British Isles to cross the Channel. No one has a better perspective to see things from both sides of the Channel than Julian Barnes. He is not only one of the premier writers in Britain but his prize-winning work has long been admired and recognised in France. In these exquisitely crafted and turned stories spanning several centuries, Julian Barnes takes as his universal theme the British in France, our fascination with the country, our various and mixed reasons for being there and our sometimes ambiguous reception.

It is the summer of 1983, and young Nick Guest, an innocent in the matters of politics and money, has moved into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: Gerald, an ambitious new Tory MP, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their children Toby and Catherine. Nick had idolized Toby at Oxford, but in his London life it will be the troubled Catherine who becomes his friend and his uneasy responsibility. At the boom years of the mid-80s unfold, Nick becomes caught up in the Feddens’ world. In an era of endless possibility, Nick finds himself able to pursue his own private obsession, with beauty – a prize as compelling to him as power and riches are to his friends.

A fighter pilot, high above the English Channel in 1941, watches the sun rise; he descends 10,000 feet and then, to his amazement, finds the sun beginning to rise again. With this haunting image Julian Barnes’ novel begins. It charts the life of Jean Serjeant, from her beginnings as a naïve, carefree country girl before the war through to her wry and trenchant old age in the year 2020. We follow her bruising experience in marriage, her questioning of male truths, her adventures in motherhood and in China; we learnt the questions she asks of life and the often unsatisfactory answers it provides.

Heartwarming and uplifting novel examining love in all its guises. As a boy, Charlie St Cloud narrowly survived a car crash that killed Sam, his little brother. Years later, still unable to recover from his loss, Charlie has taken a job tending to the lawns and monuments in the New England cemetery where Sam is buried.

The Wilderness Years are over. But not for long. At the end of Bridget Jones's Diary, Bridget hiccuped off into the sunset with man-of-her-dreams Mark Darcy. Now, in The Edge of Reason, she discovers what it is like when you have the man of your dreams actually in your flat and he hasn't done the washing-up, not just the whole of this week, but ever. Lurching through a morass of self-help-book theories and mad advice from Jude and Shazzer, struggling with a boyfriend-stealing ex-friend with thighs like a baby giraffe, an 8ft hole in the living-room wall, a mother obsessed with boiled-egg peelers, and a builder obsessed with large reservoir fish, Bridget embarks on a spiritual epiphany. Bridget is back. V.g. Книга иллюстрирована кадрами из фильма.

From the white heat of Miami to the implants of LA, the glittering waters of the Caribbean to the deserts of Arabia, Olivia Joules pits herself against the forces of terror armed only with a hatpin, razor sharp wits and a very special underwired bra. How could a girl not be drawn to the alluring, powerful Pierre Ferramo, with his hooded eyes, impeccable taste, unimaginable wealth, exotic homes across the globe and a rather dubious French accent? But is it possible that Ferramo is actually a major terrorist, bent on the western world's destruction? Or is it all just a product of Olivia Joules's overactive imagination? Join Olivia in her heart-stopping and hilarious quest to save the world in this witty, contemporary and utterly unputdownable thriller.

Night falls. In a lonely valley called the Sink, four people prepare for a quiet evening. Then in his orchard, Murray Jaccob sees a moving shadow. Acorss the swamp, his neighbour Ronnie watches her lover leave and feels her baby roll inside her. And on the verandah of the Stubbses' house, a small dog is torn screaming from its leash by something unseen. Nothing will ever be the same again. Winton delivers a truely spine-tingling thriller.

The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy: One Thursday lunchtime the Earth gets demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. For Arthur, who has just had his house demolished, this is too much. Sadly, the weekends just begun.The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: When all issues of space, time, matter and the nature of being are resolved, only one question remains: Where shall we have dinner? The Restaurant at the End of the Universe provides the ultimate gastronomic experience and, for once, there is no morning after.Life, the Universe and Everything: In consequence of a number of stunning catastrophes, Arthur Dent is surprised to find himself living in a hideously miserable cave on prehistoric Earth. And then, just as he thinks that things cannot possibly get any worse, they suddenly do.So-long, and Thanks for all the Fish: Arthur Dents sense of reality is in its dickiest state when he suddenly finds the girl of his dreams. They go in search of Gods Final Message and, in a dramatic break with tradition, actually find it.

A devastatingly moving and often very funny novel from a masterful voice. In Half a Life we are introduced to the compelling figure of Willie Chandran. Springing from the unhappy union of a low-caste mother and a father constantly at odds with life, Willie is naively eager to find something that will place him both in and apart from the world. Drawn to England, and to the immigrant and bohemian communities of post-war London, it is only in his first experience of love that he finally senses the possibility of fulfilment. In its humorous and sensitive vision of the half-lives quietly lived out at the centre of our world, V.S. Naipaul’s graceful novel brings its own unique illumination to essential aspects of our shared history.

Disillusioned by her glitzy life in London and her desirable but cruel TV-presenter boyfriend, Rosie Richardson chucks it all in and spends four years running a refugee camp in Africa. Then famine strikes in a nearby province and an influx of starving refugees threatens to overwhelm the camp. Frustrated by the cautious response of the aid agencies, Rosie decides on a drastic short-term solution. She returns to London, breaks back into the celebrity circuit and brings the celebs out to Africa for a star-studded TV emergency appeal.

Presents an exploration of contemporary love and its betrayals.

Издание полностью на английском языке. Не адаптированный текст.

Patrick Bateman is Harvard-educated and intelligent. He works by day on Wall Street, earning a fortune to complement the one he was born with. His nights he spends in ways we cannot begin to fathom — doing impermissible things to women. He is living his own American Dream.

Prentis, senior clerk in the ‘dead crimes’ department of police archives, is becoming more and more confused. Alienated from his wife and children, and obsessed by his father, a wartime hero now the mute inmate of a mental hospital, Prentis feels increasingly unsettled as his enigmatic boss, Mr Quinn, turns his investigation towards him — and his father. Gradually Prentis suspects that his father’s breakdown and Quinn’s menacing behaviour are connected and the link is to be found in his father’s memoirs, ‘Shuttlecock’...